The Future of Skype

Published 2:30 PM ET Tue, 17 May 2011
Updated 3:39 PM ET Tue, 17 May 2011
The New York Times

Well, you heard the news: Microsoft is going to buy Skype for $8.5 billion. It’s the most money Microsoft has ever spent for anything.

Analysts — the ones who think the deal is a good idea — say that Microsoft can use Skype’s voice and video technology to build into its products, like Windows and Kinect.

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Microsoft

But that’s such a weird analysis, since Windows and Kinect already have voice and video built in. Hello? NetMeeting? Windows Live Messenger?

The difference, of course, is that nobody used those programs. At least not compared with the 170 million people who use Skype every month, including close to 9 million of them who actually pay for the service. (You pay, for example, if you want to make voice calls to telephone numbers, rather than other computers or phones.)

“It’s an amazing customer footprint,” Ballmer said in a Times interview. “And Skype is a verb, as they say.”

And so is “Google.” I’d be willing to guess that this purchase was as much about “look what we’ve got, Google!” as it is about Microsoft’s technology strategy.

Every time some big clumsy corporate behemoth buys a popular consumer-tech product, I cringe. It almost never works out. The purchased company’s executives take a huge payday; promises are made all around that they’ll be allowed to continue operating independently; and then, within a couple of years, the product disappears altogether. A little star of the tech sky is snuffed out, for absolutely no good reason.

@ericfgould: Now I’ll have to login using Windows LiveHotmailWhatever acct that I haven’t used since Internet Explorer 6.

@tiffbrownolsen: Does that mean it’s going to stop working properly

When I pleaded with my followers to find something positive to say about the deal, @psdlund racked his brains and came up with: “At least it wasn’t Cisco.”

(The best tweet of all may have come the next morning from Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s top PR guy. “@fxshaw: I can tell david pogue is not up yet because he’s not retweeting snark about ms and skype.”)

Sometimes, these purchases pay off. A few of Microsoft’s acquisitions live on, even if they’re minor or unprofitable: HotMail, Visio and TellMe, for example. And the $200 million Microsoft paid for PlaceWare led to something useful: NetMeeting, the voice-and-video-chat program that competes with Skype. (Oh, wait.)

So add Skype to the list of acquisitions that took a beloved, popular consumer product and folded it into a big behemoth corporation. Will Microsoft wind up shutting it down, as it has so many other acquisitions?

Let’s meet back here in two years and compare notes.

David Pogue is a columnist for the New York Times and contributor to CNBC. He can be emailed at: pogue@nytimes.com.